


Gemma

by LauramourFromOz



Series: The Adventures of Hubble & Hallow [8]
Category: The Worst Witch (TV 1998)
Genre: (Australian) Aboriginal Kinship Systems, F/F, lgbtq+
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28191675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauramourFromOz/pseuds/LauramourFromOz
Summary: Someone from HB's past arrives at Cackle's.This Continues from 'Convergence', 'Under the Stars and 'Feverwood Academy for Rebel Witches'' and may not make a lot of sense in isolation.
Relationships: Constance Hardbroom/Imogen Drill
Series: The Adventures of Hubble & Hallow [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2039242
Kudos: 1





	1. Ghosts

HB was going over the intake for the new school year:

Darling, Jessica.

Dow, Kylie.

Foxglove, Felicity.

Holden, Gemma.

HB paused. Gemma Holden... It couldn't be, could it? It had to be a coincidence, surely.

HB opened the file.

Gemma Max Holden.

Mother: Janet Holden.

Father: Billy Holden (Nee: Wood).

HB had always found it strange that Yindi's parents had named their two daughters Yindi and Janet.

Janet was a few years younger than Yindi. HB had spent a lot of time in community preparing for, and then undertaking, her initiation and had come to know everyone quite well.

HB had been particularly fond of Janet. She was a skilled witch, even as a teenager. Constance hadn't heard much of Janet for some time. Yindi had written about her marriage which (everyone having assumed Billy was gay to the tenth power since he was two years old) had come as quite a shock, and Gemma's birth as well as a few times in between. Yindi had never mentioned the middle name.

The only other person in the staff-room was Amelia. Imogen, who had only returned this early because Constance had, was out doing an inventory of the sports' shed'. The rest of the staff weren't due back for a few days.

"Amelia?" HB said, "This first year, Gemma Holden?"

"Oh, yes. Her mother is the Australian ambassador to the Magic Council and she requested that her daughter be allowed to attend Cackle's. It's a little unorthodox to let someone in without sitting the entrance exam but Mrs Holden said she knew you. From your AWU days, I assumed.

"Yes, Janet is Yindi's younger sister. I knew her quite well while I was over there. We haven't corresponded in some time, but Yindi has kept me informed.

"Mrs Holden was quite insistent that her daughter have a place here. I don't suppose you know why?"

"I do."

"And?"

"Short answer is: because I'm here. I've told you before I was most of the way through being fully initiated into the community, and why?"

"Yes."

"Gemma is at an age where she'd be taught certain things. Certain things that I'm probably the only one in the country qualified to teach her, aside from Janet herself, and according to custom she isn't supposed to."

"You can't be the only one in the country who knows these things."

"There are a handful of others who know parts of it. Fenella and Griselda, Sibyl Hallow, to name a few. I am, however the only one who has been initiated far enough to teach it."

"That seems... complicated."

"One other thing, Gemma's middle name. You shouldn't say it aloud."

"Why?"

"It's cultural thing. It's the name of... someone who is now dead. Their people don't speak the names of their dead. We should tell the staff."

* * *

Back in their rooms later that night, Imogen pottered around while Constance sat, pensive. She looked over Gemma's file on her maglet.

Gemma Max Holden.

There hadn't been a student named Max or Maxine at Cackle's while Constance had been here. A pupil or two had had cats named Max over the years though.

HB had come up with some inventive ways to refer to the creatures without speaking the name.

Her name.

The photo in Gemma's file looked more like her namesake than either Janet or Yindi.

To honor the first woman she'd loved, the woman she'd planned to spend the rest of her life with, HB did not say her name aloud and she hadn't kept any images of her. Not Yaz's sketch of the two of them, not any of the photographs she'd had of them.

Yindi's people didn't speak the names of their dead. They didn't look at their image.

Merlin, HB had missed that face.

HB spent some time with the name, she hadn't realised how much she'd missed, how much she could miss those three letters.

Gemma's middle name was deliberate. HB's one had always been that. Only her mother had ever used the whole name.

"What's the matter HB?" Imogen said, concerned.

"What?"

"You're crying."

HB noticed that she was.

"One of the new first years is Yindi's niece."

"What's she doing here?"

"Yindi's sister, Janet is Australian Ambassador to The Magic Council. She's sending Gemma here so she can be taught by one of their own, namely me. She's a dead ringer for..." there were a number of ways that Yindi's people referred to their dead, most of them not in a language Imogen spoke, "... my one old flame."


	2. New School Year

HB watched as the girls arrived for the new school year from the staff-room window. She watched Imogen hand out hot chocolate to the girls as they arrived, as she did every year. Imogen glanced up just then, and smiled, catching her wife's eyes on her. HB had mixed feelings about the day, and Imogen knew it. About Gemma in particular.

Gemma Holden wore her silky black hair in a plat, tied (in the upper thoracic region of her spine) with a purple ribbon which matched her purple first-year sash. She looked even more like her namesake in person than she had in her photograph. Perhaps it was partially HB's imagination, after all she hadn't seen a likeness of her first love since the late seventies. The world had looked different then, the world ha been different then. Merlin, she hadn't even been twenty. Constance had taught daughters of former pupils who were now older than that.

Gemma was a good flyer, her people all were. She did a loop of the castle before making a perfect landing in the courtyard with a flourish. And if that didn't earn her her middle name...

Yindi had been right, of course. Yindi's position made her vaguely omniscient. Even before she'd taken up the mantle she was usually right. Constance had communed with her shortly after she'd discovered Gemma's enrolment. Yindi, as the vaguely omniscient often were, had been mysterious and vague about why the whole thing was a good idea for everyone. Constance trusted Yindi implicitly though, and eve before she'd come into her position she always seemed to know what she was talking about.

Gemma was talking enthusiastically with another first year. Constance was taken back to an orientation mixer when she'd first arrived at AWU. She'd been barely eighteen and standing awkwardly in a corner in a strange land. Then along had come Gemma's namesake. She'd struck up a conversation about how certain potion ingredients behaved differently when grown in the southern hemisphere to what they did when grown in the northern hemisphere. Then they'd moved onto regional substitutions used where certain ingredients just wouldn't grow. It was something that Constance was aware of but, owing to the comparative uniformity of Britain's climate, had almost no practical knowledge of.

Then Gemma's namesake had called Yindi and Yaz over and, without the particular intention of anyone involved, Constance had turned their trio into a quartet. The others had all come up together. Their people liked to joke that all the girls born to their skin in 1959 were lesbians, something that was only not true because Yaz was bisexual.

They'd spent much of the evening explaining the complicated ins and outs of their kinship system. Constance was glad she hadn't had anything stronger than apple juice because, even with the colour coded diagram Yindi was drawing in mid-air as they went, she was having difficulty following. She'd been quite nervous about keeping it straight in her head when she first went home with them to community several weeks later. As it turned out she found it significantly less convoluted in practice than she did on paper.

When Yindi's predecessor and skin grandmother had found out Constance was also a lesbian born in 1959, she'd laughed heartily and declared she must be a sister to Yaz, Yindi and Gemma's namesake. She'd had a knowing look about it all but Constance hadn't found out why for some time.

Grandmother had been impressed that Constance spoke their language, imperfectly but quite passably. Constance had always had a way with (and affection for) languages and she'd taken to it as naturally as she had Latin as a girl. The way she'd taken to Latin had been described, among other things, as 'unnatural', 'odd' and 'possibly possessed'. Something Constance had found at once highly complimentary and incredibly funny.

Gemma was now leading the other girl, Felicity Foxglove, across the courtyard by the hand, having first collected Hot Chocolate from Imogen.

Imogen herself seemed to have left her post while Constance was lost in thought, entrusting the cauldron to a pair of fourth-years . Constance wondered where she'd got to until Imogen set a mug of hot chocolate on the windowsill in front of her. HB smiled.


	3. Dreaming

It was six in the morning in about the middle of Gemma's second term at Cackle's. Constance and Imogen were categorically too old to be woken at six on a Sunday morning by a first-year pounding on their door and shouting HB's name.

Imogen shoved Constance out of bed and burrowed deeper into the covers to make up for the lost warmth of Constance's absence.

"Nobody," Constance said, pulling on her robe, "who has ever met you would believe that I'm the morning person in this marriage, my love."

Imogen made a noise of indeterminate intent and rolled over.

Constance chuckled to herself and kissed the top of her wife's head before going to see why there was a pupil pounding down their door at six on a sunday morning.

Constance arranged her face into her this-had-better-be-good expression and opened the door.

It was Jessica Darling at the door. Jessica was deaf and used a cochlear implant, the external component of which was in place over her hastily tied back auburn hair behind her left ear.

"Mrs Hardbroom," she said when HB opened the door, "come quickly, it's Gemma and Felicity. They're in some kind of trance in the courtyard."

"Show me."

HB followed Jessica to where Gemma and Felicity were sat, cross legged and holding each other by the wrist.

"I saw them out here when I was getting dressed, I tried to get them to come out of it but I don't think they could hear m. I didn't want to pull them apart in case... They're stone cold, I think they've been out here all night."

HB knew exactly what they'd tried to do and exactly what had gone wrong.

"You were right to come and get me."

HB joined Gemma and Felicity's rite by placing a hand firmly on the back each of their necks.

There was something wrong, HB could tell immediately. Their surroundings didn't look much different to what HB would expect, given Felicity's influence. It was more generally green. It felt different though. The rite they'd been attempting was all about openness. This environment was... hostile.

"Gemma Holden," HB said, before they noticed her presence, "You know better than to try this without me.

"HB!" Gemma said, relieved.

"I'm sorry, Mrs Hardbroom, it's my fault. I've done something similar and we thought between us..."

"It's nobody's fault, Felicity. The rite your people use is very similar, but not identical. They didn't mix well and you got stuck, these things happen."

"How did you find us, Mrs Hardbroom?" Felicity said.

"Felicity spotted you out her bedroom window."

"But it must be the middle of the night by now," Gemma said.

"It's 6:15, you girls have been out here all night."

"We have?" Gemma said.

"Time doesn't pass in quite the same way here. Your aunts and I were once here for six days."

Once they'd come out of it HB sent Felicity and Jessica, who hadn't left yet, to breakfast. She kept Gemma back.

"I'm sorry, HB. I really thought..."

"I know you did. Back on country you wouldn't be allowed to do these rites without someone considerably more experienced than you either. It would be at leas two years before you could. And the reason for that is in case exactly this kind of thing happens. Back home, you'd be able to be supervised by almost everyone over the age of thirteen. Here it's only me. I want you to promise me you won't try something like this without me again."

"I promise."

"Now, go catch the others up and get some breakfast. You and Felicity come and find me in a few hours and we can all try this again."

* * *

The sacred plane was not empty. Though HB, Gemma and Felicity could only see and hear each other they could feel the presence of dozens of others.

"This place is different from last time," Felicity said, looking around.

"Welcome, Felicity Foxglove, to the sacred plane. Or a part of it anyway," HB said.

"I came here with Yindi just before we left. She proposed to Yaz here," Gemma said.

"I know,"HB replied, "I was there."

"Will you show us?" Gemma asked eagerly.

"What?" Felicity said.

"The next part of the ritual," Gemma explained, "We each share a memory associated with a certain emotion."

"On that," HB said, "Everything that happens here, stays here. We don't discuss what is revealed here with anyone else."

"Yes, Mrs Hardbroom," Felicity said.

"What emotion shall we chose?" Gemma asked.

"How about, Love?" Felicity suggested.

"Love, it is," HB said.

They sat, on the red dirt in the shade of the rock. Green sprouted around Felicity. It was the only hint of her influence this time. They took each other by the wrists. Their surroundings began to change around them. Not completely, the landscape was half transparent and they could still see the rock behind the new landscape.

"Where is this?" Gemma asked, not recognising the place.

"It's up Jawoyn country. Dreaming site for owls. We came up here with one of Yindi's archaeology professors to do some field work not long before I left. We were very fortunate to be allowed to come here. It's one of their most sacred sites. The professor and I were the first Europeans to be allowed here."

It was a beautiful place, a creek ran through the site with a waterfall at one end. It looked a difficult place to get to, with the cliffs that ran along either side. The pleasantly cool water came right to the higher cliff and the lower had a narrow and precarious path down to the sand by the creek-bed. The ute they'd rode out in the tray of was parked at the top of the cliff. The water was deep and cool in the early winter Northern Territory sun.

Four young women lounged on the rocks that made up the waterfall, water tumbling lazily over them on it's way down. Two of them Gemma recognised as Yindi and Yaz. Yindi was leaning up on one elbow and Yaz was leaning up against her. Yindi's free hand was brushing a strand of hair that didn't exist behind Yaz's ear. It took Felicity and Gemma a moment to recognise HB. She was barefoot and dressed in a swimming costume under an open long sleeved shirt and was wearing a stockman's hat and a waist length plat down her back. Gemma and Felicity thought they were probably the only people other than Mrs Drill who had ever seen HB's knees. HB was leaning into another woman who bore such a striking resemblance to Gemma, they could be sisters.

"Who's that?" Gemma asked. Their hands remained joined but she didn't need to point for the others to know who she was referring to.

"That," HB said, "is your namesake."

"That's Max?" Gemma said.

HB winced.

"Sorry," Gemma said.

"If your people aren't allowed to say the names of your dead, why are you named after a dead person?" Felicity said.

"HB honors her in our way. My people decided to honor her in HB's way."

"But you aren't allowed to say your own middle name."

"I'm allowed to say it, I never knew her. Anyone born after she died or who never knew her can say it."

They couldn't hear what Yindi, Yaz, Max and HB were saying but they were talking and laughing and there was an overwhelming feeling of love and contentment, the kind that you just _knew_ was reciprocated, towards Yindi and Yaz, but towards Max most of all.


End file.
